Field
The invention relates to the virtual operational management of discrete attributes between multiple commercial goods or service transacting entities for the purpose of significantly enhancing business operating performance. These entities may conduct business within, but are not limited to, any of the following vertical industry segments: Telecommunications and Network Infrastructure; Electronics; Aerospace; Automotive; Life Sciences; Distribution; Chemicals; Energy; Government; Food and Beverage
The invention may also be embedded within new or enhanced products serving the above verticals by traditional providers of financial, manufacturing, insurance or other commercially contracted “outsourced” services.
Related Art
Though the division of labor following the outlaw of monopolistic practices in the 20th century has brought favorable competition and innovation, it has created one of the key limitations in the struggle to achieve even greater operating efficiencies across groups of interacting businesses. Specialization, even within traditionally “internal” business processes, continues to multiply the number of enterprise interfaces necessary to bring a single product to market, and with each interface, further splinters firewalled mission critical elements of business intelligence. As communication technology improves, this splintering trend will accelerate, along with the need to strategically, selectively and securely reassemble distributed intelligence to enhance or create new, more efficient business models, and fuel the next round of industrial productivity.
One technology embodiment enabling the invention is the “Grid” and its application to business solutions beyond its typical application as a networked or stand alone slave compute and storage facility. The Grid forms a basis for a significant differentiator in the future approach to interactive web-based services for commercial businesses. A product of the National Science Foundation's Middleware Initiative, Grid Technologies define a core enabling paradigm for the invention. The evolution of the Grid, a product of the Internet and Grid Technologies, supports the application of Grid Technologies to business process, forming one embodiment of the foundation for the invention. Grid protocols, defined through the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA, the standards embodying the Grid, also represented by the Globus Standard) provide a standardized foundation to synchronously, securely and autonomously manage compute and storage resources regardless of their location, and entity ownership. These protocols bind to internet protocols which create the foundation of Grid Services. Collectively, these “services” enable enterprise or distributed applications which may be written to include standard services, “customized Grid services,” or additional programming abstractions and are collectively managed by an administrative host.
A second enabling technology forming one embodiment of the invention is the release of the Globus Toolkit (3.0) which embodies the Grid standard. The emergence of Grid protocol standards have also partially eliminated what in the past was one of the greatest and most costly detractors of integrating systems—customizing software code to bridge dissimilar systems and architectures. By creating standard protocols, the Grid Forum has enabled hardware and software manufacturers to “Grid enable” their products. Now applications written to exploit Grid capabilities can be written incorporating standard or custom Grid services.
A third enabling technology for the invention is network security. Secure data transmission, intrusion detection, and encryption are required elements for the protection and distribution of sensitive information.
A fourth enabling factor for the invention is the emergence of the Basel Capital Accord II regulatory standards by the Federal Reserve and the G-8. The Basel Capital Accord II standards focus amongst other things on the discrete management of operating risk within the loan portfolios of regulated commercial banks. Because typical loan adjudication processes are lender specific, the Fed has few standards to apply to enforce uniform risk policy, and thus relies mostly on heuristic guidelines for conformance, such as those supplied by professional organizations such as Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), or the Commercial Finance Association (CFA). The invention has been partially disclosed to a member of the Federal Reserve System Task Force on Internal Credit Risk Models within the Federal Reserve Bank of Washington, D.C. and favorably received. The Fed is looking to industry to attempt to supply some finite number of acceptable solutions which they can specify. To incentive lenders to comply, the Fed has also proposed the lowering of reserves for banks that can demonstrate an acceptable operating risk management scheme before 2005.
A fifth enabling factor for the invention is the motivation on the part of lenders to find new ways of measuring, monitoring and developing competitive, loan products—safely. Discrete asset risk management enables direct asset conversion risk assignment to be calculated and applied to discrete asset purchases, previously impossible and impractical. Asset risk conversion has payment and performance risk implications within most banks lending formulas and allows quantification of risk and “cherry picking” (discerning lower risk for greater profit opportunity over competing lenders) for improvement in loan “classification” and thus in loan margins through sound analysis of their underlying risk. The invention adds a fourth loan classification beyond (1) company sector, (2) historical financials, (3) loan officer judgment, by which to determine creditworthiness. The invention also provides an extremely proactive and cost effective platform for active loan monitoring.
A sixth enabling factor for the invention is the industry-recognized need to find a solution that will support the outsourced solution of production procurement. The invention provides the three key service provider accountability elements which have prevented the paradigm from being adopted on a mass-scale: accountability to service provider “best price”, stochastic delivery assurance, and comprehensive quality assurance alert and response.
A seventh enabling factor for the invention is the beginning of acceptance of the concept of autonomic computing and the proliferation of the Grid. This is simply that applications, deployed within in a Grid network, will begin to do the lower level repetitive tasks, formerly done by people. The invention may embody some elements of an intelligent rule base.
An eighth enabling factor for the invention is the trend in software acquisition to “rent” rather than purchase and own software (software as a service, or SAAS). A huge financial benefit resulting from the outsourcing of many company operations and services is that they may be accounted for on a variable cost basis. This scheme lowers a service customer's break even level, making them more apt to survive fluctuations in business. The invention is designed to viably function within a “rent by the bit, rent by time or rent by node environment” and can be also be incorporated within a service provider's fee base—to support a higher level on-demand value add service to an end customer.
A ninth and most general enabling factor for the invention is the extreme pressure placed upon companies to expand profit margins. This is accomplished by incurring successively lower costs of product for the same revenue dollar. The largest impacting (typically) source of cost within an organization is what it pays for purchased assets and services. These require constant attention to successfully manage with constantly fewer resources.
It is the object of the invention is to create a discrete business activity management (DBAM) engine service capability, spanning across partner business entities and to selectively and universally, reassemble critical business intelligence—lost through the division of labor—sanctioned by the DBAM engine subscribers on a scale impossible to humanly reproduce—to create the most cost effective and cost impacting mechanism for the instantaneous management of business attributes. Since purchased assets, services and discretionary expense, including payroll and capital, typically represent the largest component of a company's profits and losses, and have a significant impact on cash flow, it only makes sense that they should be managed with the highest level of business intelligence.